OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Predictive Associative Memory: Retrieval Beyond Similarity Through Temporal Co-occurrence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Current approaches to memory in neural systems rely on similarity-based retrieval: given a query, find the most representationally similar stored state. This assumption -- that useful memories are similar memories -- fails to capture a fundamental property of biological memory: association through temporal co-occurrence. We propose Predictive Associative Memory (PAM), an architecture in which a JEPA-style predictor, trained on temporal co-occurrence within a continuous experience stream, learns to navigate the associative structure of an embedding space. We introduce an Inward JEPA that operates over stored experience (predicting associatively reachable past states) as the complement to the standard Outward JEPA that operates over incoming sensory data (predicting future states). We evaluate PAM as an associative recall system -- testing faithfulness of recall for experienced associations -- rather than as a retrieval system evaluated on generalisation to unseen associations. On a synthetic benchmark, the predictor's top retrieval is a true temporal associate 97% of the time (Association Precision@1 = 0.970); it achieves cross-boundary Recall@20 = 0.421 where cosine similarity scores zero; and it separates experienced-together from never-experienced-together states with a discrimination AUC of 0.916 (cosine: 0.789). Even restricted to cross-room pairs where embedding similarity is uninformative, the predictor achieves AUC = 0.849 (cosine: 0.503, chance). A temporal shuffle control confirms the signal is genuine temporal co-occurrence structure, not embedding geometry: shuffling collapses cross-boundary recall by 90%, replicated across training seeds. All results are stable across seeds (SD < 0.006) and query selections (SD $\leq$ 0.012).
Divide and Learn: Multi-Objective Combinatorial Optimization at Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Multi-objective combinatorial optimization seeks Pareto-optimal solutions over exponentially large discrete spaces, yet existing methods sacrifice generality, scalability, or theoretical guarantees. We reformulate it as an online learning problem over a decomposed decision space, solving position-wise bandit subproblems via adaptive expert-guided sequential construction. This formulation admits regret bounds of $O(d\sqrt{T \log T})$ depending on subproblem dimensionality \(d\) rather than combinatorial space size. On standard benchmarks, our method achieves 80--98\% of specialized solvers performance while achieving two to three orders of magnitude improvement in sample and computational efficiency over Bayesian optimization methods. On real-world hardware-software co-design for AI accelerators with expensive simulations, we outperform competing methods under fixed evaluation budgets. The advantage grows with problem scale and objective count, establishing bandit optimization over decomposed decision spaces as a principled alternative to surrogate modeling or offline training for multi-objective optimization.
Interpretive Cultures: Resonance, randomness, and negotiated meaning for AI-assisted tarot divination
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

While generative AI tools are increasingly adopted for creative and analytical tasks, their role in interpretive practices, where meaning is subjective, plural, and non-causal, remains poorly understood. This paper examines AI-assisted tarot reading, a divinatory practice in which users pose a query, draw cards through a randomized process, and ask AI systems to interpret the resulting symbols. Drawing on interviews with tarot practitioners and Hartmut Rosa's Theory of Resonance, we investigate how users seek, negotiate, and evaluate resonant interpretations in a context where no causal relationship exists between the query and the data being interpreted. We identify distinct ways practitioners incorporate AI into their interpretive workflows, including using AI to navigate uncertainty and self-doubt, explore alternative perspectives, and streamline or extend existing divinatory practices. Based on these findings, we offer design recommendations for AI systems that support interpretive meaning-making without collapsing ambiguity or foreclosing user agency.
Sparse Semantic Dimension as a Generalization Certificate for LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Standard statistical learning theory predicts that Large Language Models (LLMs) should overfit because their parameter counts vastly exceed the number of training tokens. Yet, in practice, they generalize robustly. We propose that the effective capacity controlling generalization lies in the geometry of the model's internal representations: while the parameter space is high-dimensional, the activation states lie on a low-dimensional, sparse manifold. To formalize this, we introduce the Sparse Semantic Dimension (SSD), a complexity measure derived from the active feature vocabulary of a Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) trained on the model's layers. Treating the LLM and SAE as frozen oracles, we utilize this framework to attribute the model's generalization capabilities to the sparsity of the dictionary rather than the total parameter count. Empirically, we validate this framework on GPT-2 Small and Gemma-2B, demonstrating that our bound provides non-vacuous certificates at realistic sample sizes. Crucially, we uncover a counter-intuitive "feature sharpness" scaling law: despite being an order of magnitude larger, Gemma-2B requires significantly fewer calibration samples to identify its active manifold compared to GPT-2, suggesting that larger models learn more compressible, distinct semantic structures. Finally, we show that this framework functions as a reliable safety monitor: out-of-distribution inputs trigger a measurable "feature explosion" (a sharp spike in active features), effectively signaling epistemic uncertainty through learned feature violation. Code is available at: https://github.com/newcodevelop/sparse-semantic-dimension.
Causal-JEPA: Learning World Models through Object-Level Latent Interventions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

World models require robust relational understanding to support prediction, reasoning, and control. While object-centric representations provide a useful abstraction, they are not sufficient to capture interaction-dependent dynamics. We therefore propose C-JEPA, a simple and flexible object-centric world model that extends masked joint embedding prediction from image patches to object-centric representations. By applying object-level masking that requires an object's state to be inferred from other objects, C-JEPA induces latent interventions with counterfactual-like effects and prevents shortcut solutions, making interaction reasoning essential. Empirically, C-JEPA leads to consistent gains in visual question answering, with an absolute improvement of about 20\% in counterfactual reasoning compared to the same architecture without object-level masking. On agent control tasks, C-JEPA enables substantially more efficient planning by using only 1\% of the total latent input features required by patch-based world models, while achieving comparable performance. Finally, we provide a formal analysis demonstrating that object-level masking induces a causal inductive bias via latent interventions. Our code is available at https://github.com/galilai-group/cjepa.
Evolution With Purpose: Hierarchy-Informed Optimization of Whole-Brain Models
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2026
Year: 2026

Evolutionary search is well suited for large-scale biophysical brain modeling, where many parameters with nonlinear interactions and no tractable gradients need to be optimized. Standard evolutionary approaches achieve an excellent fit to MRI data; however, among many possible such solutions, it finds ones that overfit to individual subjects and provide limited predictive power. This paper investigates whether guiding evolution with biological knowledge can help. Focusing on whole-brain Dynamic Mean Field (DMF) models, a baseline where 20 parameters were shared across the brain was compared against a heterogeneous formulation where different sets of 20 parameters were used for the seven canonical brain regions. The heterogeneous model was optimized using four strategies: optimizing all parameters at once, a curricular approach following the hierarchy of brain networks (HICO), a reversed curricular approach, and a randomly shuffled curricular approach. While all heterogeneous strategies fit the data well, only curricular approaches generalized to new subjects. Most importantly, only HICO made it possible to use the parameter sets to predict the subjects' behavioral abilities as well. Thus, by guiding evolution with biological knowledge about the hierarchy of brain regions, HICO demonstrated how domain knowledge can be harnessed to serve the purpose of optimization in real-world domains.
Can We Really Learn One Representation to Optimize All Rewards?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

As machine learning has moved towards leveraging large models as priors for downstream tasks, the community has debated the right form of prior for solving reinforcement learning (RL) problems. If one were to try to prefetch as much computation as possible, they would attempt to learn a prior over the policies for some yet-to-be-determined reward function. Recent work (forward-backward (FB) representation learning) has tried this, arguing that an unsupervised representation learning procedure can enable optimal control over arbitrary rewards without further fine-tuning. However, FB's training objective and learning behavior remain mysterious. In this paper, we demystify FB by clarifying when such representations can exist, what its objective optimizes, and how it converges in practice. We draw connections with rank matching, fitted Q-evaluation, and contraction mapping. Our analysis suggests a simplified unsupervised pre-training method for RL that, instead of enabling optimal control, performs one step of policy improvement. We call our proposed method $\textbf{one-step forward-backward representation learning (one-step FB)}$. Experiments in didactic settings, as well as in $10$ state-based and image-based continuous control domains, demonstrate that one-step FB converges to errors $10^5$ smaller and improves zero-shot performance by $+24\%$ on average. Our project website is available at https://chongyi-zheng.github.io/onestep-fb.
Multi Layer Protection Against Low Rate DDoS Attacks in Containerized Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

Low rate Distributed Denial of Service DDoS attacks have emerged as a major threat to containerized cloud infrastructures. Due to their low traffic volumes, these attacks can be difficult to detect and mitigate, potentially causing serious harm to internet applications. This work proposes a DDoS mitigation system that effectively defends against low rate DDoS attacks in containerized environments using a multi layered defense strategy. The solution integrates a Web Application Firewall WAF, rate limiting, dynamic blacklisting, TCP and UDP header analysis, and zero trust principles to detect and block malicious traffic at different stages of the attack life cycle. By applying zero trust principles, the system ensures that each data packet is carefully inspected before granting access, improving overall security and resilience. Additionally, the systems integration with Docker orchestration facilitates deployment and management in containerized settings.
GHOST: Unmasking Phantom States in Mamba2 via Grouped Hidden-state Output-aware Selection & Truncation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

While Mamba2's expanded state dimension enhances temporal modeling, it incurs substantial inference overhead that saturates bandwidth during autoregressive generation. Standard pruning methods fail to address this bottleneck: unstructured sparsity leaves activations dense, magnitude-based selection ignores runtime dynamics, and gradient-based methods impose prohibitive costs. We introduce GHOST (Grouped Hidden-state Output-aware Selection and Truncation), a structured pruning framework that approximates control-theoretic balanced truncation using only forward-pass statistics. By jointly measuring controllability and observability, GHOST rivals the fidelity of gradient-based methods without requiring backpropagation. As a highlight, on models ranging from 130M to 2.7B parameters, our approach achieves a 50\% state-dimension reduction with approximately 1 perplexity point increase on WikiText-2. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/mamba2_ghost-7BCB/.
CADET: Context-Conditioned Ads CTR Prediction With a Decoder-Only Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is fundamental to online advertising systems. While Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs) with explicit feature interactions have long dominated this domain, recent advances in generative recommenders have shown promising results in content recommendation. However, adapting these transformer-based architectures to ads CTR prediction still presents unique challenges, including handling post-scoring contextual signals, maintaining offline-online consistency, and scaling to industrial workloads. We present CADET (Context-Conditioned Ads Decoder-Only Transformer), an end-to-end decoder-only transformer for ads CTR prediction deployed at LinkedIn. Our approach introduces several key innovations: (1) a context-conditioned decoding architecture with multi-tower prediction heads that explicitly model post-scoring signals such as ad position, resolving the chicken-and-egg problem between predicted CTR and ranking; (2) a self-gated attention mechanism that stabilizes training by adaptively regulating information flow at both representation and interaction levels; (3) a timestamp-based variant of Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) that captures temporal relationships across timescales from seconds to months; (4) session masking strategies that prevent the model from learning dependencies on unavailable in-session events, addressing train-serve skew; and (5) production engineering techniques including tensor packing, sequence chunking, and custom Flash Attention kernels that enable efficient training and serving at scale. In online A/B testing, CADET achieves a 11.04\% CTR lift compared to the production LiRank baseline model, a hybrid ensemble of DCNv2 and sequential encoders. The system has been successfully deployed on LinkedIn's advertising platform, serving the main traffic for homefeed sponsored updates.
Fighting MRI Anisotropy: Learning Multiple Cardiac Shapes From a Single Implicit Neural Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

The anisotropic nature of short-axis (SAX) cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI) limits cardiac shape analysis. To address this, we propose to leverage near-isotropic, higher resolution computed tomography angiography (CTA) data of the heart. We use this data to train a single neural implicit function to jointly represent cardiac shapes from CMRI at any resolution. We evaluate the method for the reconstruction of right ventricle (RV) and myocardium (MYO), where MYO simultaneously models endocardial and epicardial left-ventricle surfaces. Since high-resolution SAX reference segmentations are unavailable, we evaluate performance by extracting a 4-chamber (4CH) slice of RV and MYO from their reconstructed shapes. When compared with the reference 4CH segmentation masks from CMRI, our method achieved a Dice similarity coefficient of 0.91 $\pm$ 0.07 and 0.75 $\pm$ 0.13, and a Hausdorff distance of 6.21 $\pm$ 3.97 mm and 7.53 $\pm$ 5.13 mm for RV and MYO, respectively. Quantitative and qualitative assessment demonstrate the model's ability to reconstruct accurate, smooth and anatomically plausible shapes, supporting improvements in cardiac shape analysis.
Ctrl&Shift: High-Quality Geometry-Aware Object Manipulation in Visual Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Object-level manipulation, relocating or reorienting objects in images or videos while preserving scene realism, is central to film post-production, AR, and creative editing. Yet existing methods struggle to jointly achieve three core goals: background preservation, geometric consistency under viewpoint shifts, and user-controllable transformations. Geometry-based approaches offer precise control but require explicit 3D reconstruction and generalize poorly; diffusion-based methods generalize better but lack fine-grained geometric control. We present Ctrl&Shift, an end-to-end diffusion framework to achieve geometry-consistent object manipulation without explicit 3D representations. Our key insight is to decompose manipulation into two stages, object removal and reference-guided inpainting under explicit camera pose control, and encode both within a unified diffusion process. To enable precise, disentangled control, we design a multi-task, multi-stage training strategy that separates background, identity, and pose signals across tasks. To improve generalization, we introduce a scalable real-world dataset construction pipeline that generates paired image and video samples with estimated relative camera poses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ctrl&Shift achieves state-of-the-art results in fidelity, viewpoint consistency, and controllability. To our knowledge, this is the first framework to unify fine-grained geometric control and real-world generalization for object manipulation, without relying on any explicit 3D modeling.
Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in Vector Databases: System Design and Performance Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2026
Year: 2026

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications increasingly rely on Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (FANNS) to combine semantic retrieval with metadata constraints. While algorithmic innovations for FANNS have been proposed, there remains a lack of understanding regarding how generic filtering strategies perform within Vector Databases. In this work, we systematize the taxonomy of filtering strategies and evaluate their integration into FAISS, Milvus, and pgvector. To provide a robust benchmarking framework, we introduce a new relational dataset, \textit{MoReVec}, consisting of two tables, featuring 768-dimensional text embeddings and a rich schema of metadata attributes. We further propose the \textit{Global-Local Selectivity (GLS)} correlation metric to quantify the relationship between filters and query vectors. Our experiments reveal that algorithmic adaptations within the engine often override raw index performance. Specifically, we find that: (1) \textit{Milvus} achieves superior recall stability through hybrid approximate/exact execution; (2) \textit{pgvector}'s cost-based query optimizer frequently selects suboptimal execution plans, favoring approximate index scans even when exact sequential scans would yield perfect recall at comparable latency; and (3) partition-based indexes (IVFFlat) outperform graph-based indexes (HNSW) for low-selectivity queries. To facilitate this analysis, we extend the widely-used \textit{ANN-Benchmarks} to support filtered vector search and make it available online. Finally, we synthesize our findings into a set of practical guidelines for selecting index types and configuring query optimizers for hybrid search workloads.
Hardening the OSv Unikernel with Efficient Address Randomization: Design and Performance Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

Unikernels are single-purpose library operating systems that run the kernel and application in one address space, but often omit security mitigations such as address space layout randomization (ASLR). In OSv, boot, program loading, and thread creation select largely deterministic addresses, leading to near-identical layouts across instances and more repeatable exploitation. To reduce layout predictability, this research introduces ASLR-style diversity into OSv by randomizing the application base and thread stack regions through targeted changes to core memory-management and loading routines. The implementation adds minimal complexity while preserving OSv's lightweight design goals. Evaluation against an unmodified baseline finds comparable boot time, application runtime, and memory usage. Analysis indicates that the generated addresses exhibit a uniform distribution. These results show that layout-randomization defenses can be efficiently and effectively integrated into OSv unikernels, improving resistance to reliable exploitation.
Hierarchical Concept Embedding & Pursuit for Interpretable Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Interpretable-by-design models are gaining traction in computer vision because they provide faithful explanations for their predictions. In image classification, these models typically recover human-interpretable concepts from an image and use them for classification. Sparse concept recovery methods leverage the latent space of vision-language models to represent image embeddings as a sparse combination of concept embeddings. However, because such methods ignore the hierarchical structure of concepts, they can produce correct predictions with explanations that are inconsistent with the hierarchy. In this work, we propose Hierarchical Concept Embedding \& Pursuit (HCEP), a framework that induces a hierarchy of concept embeddings in the latent space and uses hierarchical sparse coding to recover the concepts present in an image. Given a hierarchy of semantic concepts, we construct a corresponding hierarchy of concept embeddings and, assuming the correct concepts for an image form a rooted path in the hierarchy, derive desirable conditions for identifying them in the embedded space. We show that hierarchical sparse coding reliably recovers hierarchical concept embeddings, whereas vanilla sparse coding fails. Our experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that HCEP outperforms baselines in concept precision and recall while maintaining competitive classification accuracy. Moreover, when the number of samples is limited, HCEP achieves superior classification accuracy and concept recovery. These results show that incorporating hierarchical structures into sparse coding yields more reliable and interpretable image classification models.
A Generic Framework for Fair Consensus Clustering in Streams
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Consensus clustering seeks to combine multiple clusterings of the same dataset, potentially derived by considering various non-sensitive attributes by different agents in a multi-agent environment, into a single partitioning that best reflects the overall structure of the underlying dataset. Recent work by Chakraborty et al, introduced a fair variant under proportionate fairness and obtained a constant-factor approximation by naively selecting the best closest fair input clustering; however, their offline approach requires storing all input clusterings, which is prohibitively expensive for most large-scale applications. In this paper, we initiate the study of fair consensus clustering in the streaming model, where input clusterings arrive sequentially and memory is limited. We design the first constant-factor algorithm that processes the stream while storing only a logarithmic number of inputs. En route, we introduce a new generic algorithmic framework that integrates closest fair clustering with cluster fitting, yielding improved approximation guarantees not only in the streaming setting but also when revisited offline. Furthermore, the framework is fairness-agnostic: it applies to any fairness definition for which an approximately close fair clustering can be computed efficiently. Finally, we extend our methods to the more general k-median consensus clustering problem.